Buzzfeed

When you are an old timer, such as I, you catch on to these high tech things rather slowly. I still haven’t caught on to Facebook and don’t understand for a second what the big fuss is all about. I do my facebooking every morning, over coffee, with my wife. Now there’s Buzzfeed; and I’m giving it a try.
by Charlie Leck

So, how far behind the times am I? I am hopelessly behind. For instance, I just found out about Buzzfeed yesterday and, of course, that’s an elementary (kindergarten) approach for most people. I mean people are talking about Smart TVs soon being obsolete and I don’t even know what they are yet. The fellow who installed my DVR (I don’t know what the letters stand for) and my Blue Ray player told me I was now equipped to receive programming via wi-fi on my TV (whatever that means). Of course, he also mentioned that my “provider” would probably have to increase my “connection speeds” to “10 to 15 megabits” for me to use it effectively. My speeds, he said, are good enough for things like Hulu (what?), it isn’t good enough for “streaming high-definition.”

It was quite enough for me to venture over to Buzzfeed yesterday. Once there, I had to go to a its “help page” (“How to use Buzzfeed”) to try to figure out what it was all about.

So, this is a great one (I just found it on Buzzfeed yesterday): George Bernard Shaw sent a message to Winston Churchill: “Have reserved two tickets for opening night. Come and bring a friend, if you have one.”

Churchill then replied: “Impossible to come to first night. Will come to second night, if you have one.”

I would not want to get into a cat fight with Churchill. Here’s another little repartee…

Lady Astor sent him a message saying: “Winston, if you were my husband, I’d put poison in your coffee.”

And, Churchill replied: “Nancy, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

So (don’t you just hate people who begin every paragraph with the word “so?”), just what the heck is Buzzfeed anyway? Well, it starts off as a web site and it has a help page designed to assist one such as I in using the web site. I felt very stupid that I had to go to that “help page.”

So, how the hell did I even get on to Buzzfeed? Well, I was listening to Minnesota Public Radio yesterday and there was this wonderful interview of Slate’s editor-in-chief, David Plotz, and he had great praise for Buzzfeed. As I listened to him, I said to myself: “What the hell is Buzzfeed?” [P.S. I got hooked on Slate four or five years ago and I’m a very frequent visitor to that news site.]

You see, about this Buzzfeed thing, it was almost as if a friend had called me up and said: “Why aren’t you using email? Email is really cool and I think you’d be good at it!” It was as if Mr. Plotz was talking directly to me during his interview yesterday, telling me Buzzfeed was made just for me. Now, however, just like Facebook, my dilemma is this: “Okay, here I am! Now just what do I do?”

I decided I needed to begin on this Buzzfeed slowly. Once, I jumped right into Facebook cold turkey and it went very badly – so badly they I had to go into anger management treatment as a result. Facebook and I don’t get along – unless I come upon one of sweet Laurence’s wonderful contributions that make me so happy that I go through all the rest of the useless stuff people put up there just so I can find her postings (I’m really sorry if I’m offending anyone. It’s something that I do quite frequently and then I always feel terrible about it afterward – or afterword). Laurence is a French woman and you know how the French women are – ooh, la, la! And, if you knew her like I know her, you’d be willing to fight your way through Facebook posts to get to her too.

So, this is my Buzzfeed game plan. For awhile, I’m going to just visit Buzzfeed every day and see what its citizen reporters are reporting on – turning in, as I understand it, items they find on many parts of the web and sometimes posting scoops about crazy things someone did on the web or said on the web – could be just a written report or it might be a video. I guess some of these Buzzfeed contributors sometime win little badges of honor and thus notoriety. The rules are simple – like, don’t post porn and don’t try to plug your own blog or commercial products or you’ll be banned forever from the Kingdom of Buzzfeed.

Some fellow posted this wonderful repartee of Winston Churchill that I’ve quoted here today. Wonderful stuff. It’ll draw me back to Buzzfeed a couple of times. I may find it’s nothing but a bunch of poppycock. If so I’ll let you know.

So, Bessie Braddock, a Member of Parliament, said to Winston Churchill: “Winston, you are drunk!”

Church replied to Ms. Braddock: “You’re right, Bessie. And you’re ugly. But tomorrow morning, I’ll be sober.”

Ooh!

I’ll just add this little note about what I found this morning on Buzzfeed about Facebook…
33 Ways Facebook Ruins Your Life (check it out).

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